David Miller: BBC to ensure Rea Sports Personality success is never repeated

Jonathan Rea’s second place in last year’s BBC Sports Personality of the Year competition -– if it can be called that – upset all the old, white men at Broadcasting House so much they are taking measures to ensure that minority sports are never again allowed to surpass establishment favourites.

The massive support Rea garnered in the public vote – which Anthony Joshua was so sure he had won that he wheeled in an entourage big enough to wear all of Elton John’s dresses from 1972 onwards – so irked BBC management, they will change the way the prize is decided.

Apparently, the public are not to be trusted as it is they who upset the 2017 apple-cart, having the temerity to vote for a winner who couldn’t be there and a second place that none of them had ever heard of, because he was not a member of the Marylebone Cricket Club or the Lawn Tennis Association or one of the other establishments to which they venture for lunch and fall asleep in their port of an afternoon.

The BBC is funded in a unique way – by us via a system of legalised extortion – but god forbid we should decide who our favoured sportsperson of the year is. The establishment does not want their – oh wait, it’s paid for from the licence fee so it’s actually our – blue riband event hijacked by a load of ne’er-do-wells who’ve never even been to Lords.